Me and the Fat Man - Softcover

Myerson, Julie

3.21

156 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007202970 ISBN 13: 9780007202973

Publisher: Harper, 2005

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Myerson's third novel, her most uninhibited and powerful, is Amy's story - a journey of sexual desire and her strange relationship with the fat man who rescues her from the past. Amy is a waitress living in Bath. She is married but she also finds men from the park, gives them sex for money and pays it straight into Nationwide. And then the mysterious Harris arrives in the restaurant one day; he knew Amy's mother, who drowned in the Aegean when Amy was just a young girl. Amy is confused but intrigued when Harris demands that she meets his friend Gary, a young fat man he shares a flat with. It is the beginning of a strange relationship that will take them back to Greece, where the past - and all its dark secrets - is confronted. Amy's story is so compulsive and frightening that it is impossible to put down. It is told in a spare and hypnotic prose that will leave you enchanted. Me and the Fat Man establishes this highly acclaimed writer as one of the finest novelists at work today.

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Review:

An unlikely romance, a psychological mystery, an erotic thriller--Me and the Fat Man is all and none of the above, eluding categorization as skillfully as it limns its characters' desperate, love-starved lives. In Julie Myerson's third novel, Amy waits tables in a small English city and in her spare time turns tricks for reasons she can't quite articulate, even to herself. She's married, but without love or lust or much of anything else. "I like you because you don't expect anything," her husband tells her when they first meet. An orphan born in Greece, Amy grew up in a foster home that was "creepy and electric," where she was treated with ostensible fairness but always made to feel just how lucky she was that they took her in. "What's flesh and blood? Not blood and string and fat like on a joint of meat, but just this person smiling and smiling at the stupidest things about you," she muses, and thinks, "I'd have given anything for that."

Then a stranger named Harris walks into the restaurant and promises to give Amy back her past, claiming to have known her mother. Slowly he draws Amy into his life and introduces her to Gary, the gentle fat man of the title. Prompted by Harris, the two find themselves in an affair; what's surprising is that they fall in love, the last thing either of their lives has led them to expect. But Gary has secrets of his own, and is strangely in Harris's thrall. The key to both of their pasts lies on the Greek island of Eknos, where Amy's life comes spiraling together in a way that seems both improbable and true--like everything else in this novel, from its offbeat eroticism to the painful physicality of its prose. Me and the Fat Man is bleak and magical in equal measure. --Mary Park

About the Author:

Julie Myerson was born in Nottingham in 1960, read English at Bristol University and worked for the National Theatre and Walker Books before becoming a full-time writer. She has published five novels: Sleepwalking, The Touch, Me & the Fat Man, Laura Blundy and Something Might Happen (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2003). She lives in London.

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